Research

At the last meeting of the Cross-party Group on Chronic Pain discussed support for chronic pain patients’ equal rights to access through the NHS, if they wish, at least the Complementary and Alternative Therapies (CAM) recommended by the SIGN guideline on chronic pain management and related findings in the GRIPS Reports. This proposal was unanimously supported and those issues will be discussed as the first item at our next meeting on Tuesday, 24th Feb 2015

Are chronic pain patients who want CAM treatments getting fair access on the NHS? The CPG agreed to members’ requests to discuss this following claims that access was not equal, despite some CAM treatments being approved by the SIGN guidelines on Chronic Pain.

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“Persons living with chronic pain have often been grouped into a single category, and treatment approaches have been generalized with little evidence to support this practice,” said Dr. David B. Reuben, panel chair and professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Chronic pain spans a multitude of conditions, presents in different ways, and requires an individualized, multifaceted approach.”

It is known that infections and other types of stressors are capable of triggering the development of FM. We hypothesize that these stressors could be responsible for triggering a reactivation of latent herpesviruses, and that this reactivation could in turn lead to the central nervous system dysregulation seen in this condition. The present study was designed to evaluate an anti-viral drug combination selected for activity against herpes class viruses.

A new study from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators has found, for the first time, evidence of neuroinflammation in key regions of the brains of patients with chronic pain. By showing that levels of an inflammation-linked protein are elevated in regions known to be involved in the transmission of pain, the study published online in the journal Brain paves the way for the exploration of potential new treatment strategies and identifies a possible way around one of the most frustrating limitations in the study and treatment of chronic pain – the lack of an objective way to measure the presence or intensity of pain.

A new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder finds that when we use our thoughts to dull or enhance our experience of pain, the physical pain signal in the brain—sent by nerves in the area of a wound, for example, and encoded in multiple regions in the cerebrum—does not actually change. Instead the act of using thoughts to modulate pain, a technique called “cognitive self-regulation” that is commonly used to manage chronic pain, works via a separate pathway in the brain.

The findings, published in the journal PLOS Biology this month, show that the processing of pain in our brains goes beyond the mere physical pain signal and underscore a growing understanding among neuroscientists that there is not a single pain system in the brain, as was once believed.

A new “trick” steroids use to suppress inflammation, which could be used to make new anti-inflammatory drugs without the harmful side effects of steroids, has been discovered by researchers at Georgia State University.

Their findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.